Durrell and the City commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Alexandria Quartet with a collection of fourteen new essays by a group of international scholars and critics. The collection provides a critical consideration of Durrell's urban landscapes, from the London of his early novels to Avignon during World War II in his last great series, while focusing on the place that made him famous--the city of Alexandria--in order to provide a reassessment of his career and achievement.

Durrell and the City commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Alexandria Quartet with a collection of fourteen new essays by a group of international scholars and critics. The collection provides a critical consideration of Durrell's urban landscapes, from the London of his early novels to Avignon during World War II in his last great series, while focusing on the place that made him famous—the city of Alexandria—in order to provide a reassessment of his career and achievement.

From the olive trees of southern France to Gnostic cults in Egypt, a man and his lovers are invented and reinvented in this first volume of a great literary adventure. For British doctor Bruce Drexel, a return to Provence is bittersweet. Here, at a rustic chateau, he once fell in love with Sylvie, the Frenchwoman who would become his wife, and befriended her brother, Piers. The three made up a peculiar, potent ménage for years until Sylvie’s descent into madness and Piers’s suicide. As Drexel attends to Piers’s affairs, he becomes steeped in the memories of a spiritually transformational trip to Egypt; the band of intellectual confederates who used to be his intimate friends; and a three-sided love that became his reason for being. So begins Monsieur, the masterful first entry of Durrell’s Avignon Quintet, an infinite regress of memory and imagination that challenges the formal conventions of fiction.

The Durrell family are immortalised in Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals and its ITV adaptation, The Durrells. But what of the real life Durrells? Why did they go to Corfu in the first place - and what happened to them after they left? The real story of the Durrells is as surprising and fascinating as anything in Gerry's books, and Michael Haag, with his first hand knowledge of the family, is the ideal narrator, drawing on diaries, letters and unpublished autobiographical fragments. The Durrells of Corfu describes the family's upbringing in India and the crisis that brought them to England and then Greece. It recalls the genuine characters they encountered on Corfu - Theodore the biologist, the taxi driver Spiro Halikiopoulos and the prisoner Kosti - as well as the visit of American writer Henry Miller. And Haag has unearthed the story of how the Durrells left Corfu, including Margo's and Larry's last-minute escapes before the War. An extended epilogue looks at the emergence of Larry as a world famous novelist, and Gerry as a naturalist and champion of endangered species, as well as the lives of the rest of the family, their friends and other animals. The book is illustrated with family photos from the Gerald Durrell Archive, many of them reproduced here for the first time.

DIVDIVThe final installment of the Alexandria Quartet, hailed by the New York Times Book Review as “one of the most important works of our time”/divDIV /divDIVYears after his liaisons with Justine and Melissa, Darley becomes immersed in a relationship with Clea, a bisexual artist. The ensuing chain of events transforms not only the lovers, but the dead as well, and leads to the series’ brilliant and unexpected resolution. /divDIV /divDIVPraised by Life as among the “most discussed and widely admired serious fiction of our time,” Clea carries on Durrell’s assured and unwavering style, and confirms the series’ standing as a resounding masterpiece of twentieth-century fiction./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook contains a new introduction by Jan Morris./div /div

Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet is regarded as the central work in his fiction. It has provoked critical commentary ever since the appearance of its individual volumes – Justine (1957), Balthazar (1958), Mountolive and Clea (1959) and the publication in a one-volume edition in 1962. Scores of Master’s and PhD dissertations have been written since the 1960s on this most compelling and provocative novel. Today, The Alexandria Quartet stimulates critical discussion in works addressing the city, Durrell’s representation of Alexandria, the theory of relativity, the role of memory, the recurring feature of the doppelgänger and the presence of the Gothic uncanny; his frequent references to D.H. Lawrence; his treatment of women characters; his interest in Gnosticism; and his own description of the Quartet as “a strange mixture of sex and the secret service”. This volume of essays addresses all these themes, and brings together the mature work of four scholars on this central work of Durrell’s fiction, together with two essays on its sequels, Tunc-Nunquam (1968-70) and The Avignon Quintet (1974-85).

Reading the twelve major novels of Lawrence Durrell, this study argues for their consideration as a single major project, an opus, marked by themes of liminality and betweenness. As major texts of mid-twentieth-century literature, repeatedly earning nominations for the Nobel Prize, Durrell’s work has attracted renewed critical attention since his centenary in 2012. This study shows the thematic unity of the opus in five areas. First, by disrupting expectations of love and death and by fashioning plural narrators, works in the opus blend notions of the subject and the object. Second, in their use of metafictional elements, the texts present themselves as neither fiction nor reality. Third, their approach to place and identity offers something between the naturalistic and the human-centric. Fourth, though the texts’ initial concerns are engaged with understanding the past and preparing for a future, they all resolve in something like the present. And fifth, though the novels reject many aspects of modernism, they reside nevertheless between the poles of modernism and postmodernism. Shared with other writers, including T.S. Eliot and Henry Miller, as early as the 1940s, Durrell’s plans for his major works of fiction remained consistent through the publication of the last novel in 1985, and these plans show the need to consider the twelve major works as a unitary whole.

Novelist Lawrence Durrell's fondness for his adopted homeland of Greece led him to declare "I'm a Greek," and profoundly influenced his work. Attempting to capture the scope of the Greek world's relationship with Durrell's life and work, Lilios (English, U. of Central Florida) presents 22 papers that approach the topic from a range of perspectives. After a number of reminiscences of Durrell by family and friends, a set of essays are organized by place, examining Durrell's relationship with Corfu, Alexandria, Rhodes, and Cyprus. The remaining essays are grouped according to theme discussing such issues as the influence of myth and other "Greek inspirations" on Durrell's novels, poems, and other work. Distributed by Associated University Presses. Annotation ♭2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

A Psychoanalytic Study of Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet: Exile and Return focuses on the dialogue created by literature and psychoanalysis in an individual’s quest to explore existential issues, such as a sense of belonging to a homeland and a recurring sense of the Uncanny (das unheimliche). Rony Alfandary explores Durrell’s attempt to recreate a sense of belonging to a homeland, which perhaps never existed but can be retraced and reinvented through writing. This book studies some issues present in Durrell’s work: the connection between biographical and fictional elements in the study of literature the influence of early Freudian theoretical themes upon the writer later influences including post-modern and hermeneutic theories The life and work of Lawrence Durrell can serve as a prototype of a man’s quest for meaning, in a world caught in turmoil in the period between and during WW2. The author’s psychoanalytic exploration of the work and its relevance to human experience today, shows how the themes Durrell dealt with remain relevant. Alfandary highlights the ways in which his usage of several author narrative styles exemplifies the divergent and often contradictory nature of "Truth", emerging rather as multi-layered, multi-voiced and often torn sense of human subjectivity. A Psychoanalytic Study of Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet: Exile and Return demonstrates Durrell’s strong influence by psychoanalytic thought and will appeal to both psychoanalytic and literary scholars.

In this second volume of his study of the Anglo-Irish novelist Lawrence Durrell (following the appearance in 1988 of The Dandy and the Herald: Manners, Mind and Morals from Brummell to Durrell Richard Pine examines in detail Durrell's unique contribution to the development of the modern novel, concentrating in particular on the evidence of Durrell's private notebooks and diaries. Pine's twenty-year friendship with Burrell has resulted in an intimate portrait of a singular mind whose extraordinary career, both as a writer and as a British colonial official, is hallmarked by the creation of 'the Heraldic Universe', an imaginative realm within which the artist reigns supreme.